Live From the Rose Bowl: Pregame

Keith Arnold, of Road to Game Day fame, is at the Rose Bowl and will be posting about the experience throughout the evening.



I could get used to this stuff. Even living in Los Angeles, you forget how awesome Pasadena is. The neighborhoods look like honest to goodness neighborhoods with trees and clean streets, and perfectly manicured yards. Pasadena is so eerily perfect that Desperate Housewives uses a random street in the city for its set design. (I’m not sure Pasadena can be happy with that decision.) The Rose Bowl is one of the most picturesque venues for college football, and true to form, it’s 72 degrees, sunny, and a perfect day for football. Driving north up the Harbor Freeway, I left with plenty of time this morning, as the 35 miles can sometimes take hours, not minutes. But there wasn’t a sniff of traffic, as the New Years festivities of last night must’ve rendered commuters too hungover to go anywhere this morning.

If you’re looking for any analysis of the Rose Parade, you’re out of luck. I’m not sure what I find more ridiculous, the fact that people spend months cutting up flowers and gluing them into floats, or the fact that thousands of people get up before sunrise on New Years Day to get in place to watch these floats drive by.

Most of the parking for Rose Bowl tailgating is on a golf course. Instead of being set up on acres of parking lots, most people are parked on lush fairways or Bermuda grass rough. The Penn State faithful might not have had USC fans outnumbered at the scene, but they certainly seemed more jacked up. I arrived about three hours before the game to find Paternoville West already rocking. Setting up shop just off a greenside bunker, they had a PA system, full-working bar with top-shelf drinks, and enough people collectively drinking to think that the Nittany Lions actually have a shot. There were more than a few drunk college kids using the sandtrap as a mini-beach, and white, tanless bodies were plentiful.

I think I parked next to Curtis Enis, but I was too big a chicken to go up and say something, especially since the conversation might have gone something like this:

Me: Hey, Curtis Enis, what’s going on?

Curtis Enis: I’m going to the Rose Bowl, what does it look like I’m doing?

Me: (stuttering) Going to the Rose Bowl. ... Me too. (Pause) Hey, remember your cameo in Jerry Maguire? That was awesome. What happened with the Bears?

Curtis Enis walks away, shaking his head.

End Scene.

I’ll be coming to you live after each quarter, from up top at the Rose Bowl, so check back here for some hard-hitting analysis from the Grand-Daddy of them all ...

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.